The “Underlying Social Contract”

Friday, July 20th, 2012

Another thing to be explored in this you-didn’t-build-ism, which I was going to tack on to the end but I decided it’s worth a post of its own…Thomas Sowell, as he very often does, states it better and more clearly than anybody:

People who run businesses are benefitting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?
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Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be expected to feel like free loaders who owe still more to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, because it is part of an “underlying social contract.”

Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy on the left — one that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled “The Promise of American Life.”

Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was magically transformed by rhetoric into a “promise” that American society was supposed to have made — and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so successful politically that all sorts of “social contracts” began to appear magically in the rhetoric of the left.

If talking in this mystical way is enough to get you control of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money, why not?

Prof. Sowell discusses this Croly character, in the context of these invented mythical “social” obligations, on p. 89 of his book Intellectuals and Society under “Intellectuals and Social Visions.” You should run out and snap up a copy if you don’t have one yet. It is a critique sited in on a very specific target:

Jonas Salk’s end product was a vaccine, as Bill Gates’ end product was a computer operating system. Despite the brainpower, insights, and talents involved in these and other achievements, such individuals are not intellectuals. An intellectual’s work begins and ends with ideas, however influential those ideas may be on concrete things — in the hands of others. [emphasis Sowell’s]

The unstated question that repeatedly bobbles up to the surface is, how might the intellectual’s idea change if the intellectual were to assume personal responsibility for implementing it, and then availed of the opportunity to revise the idea with the lessons learned from toiling away within that unforgiving plane of reality.

Some of this “social construct” stuff might end up on the cutting-room floor, I think. It’s rather easy to speak of magical, here-from-nowhere contracts when it’s the other guy who has to meet them.

The unstated question that repeatedly bobbles up to the surface is, how might the intellectual’s idea change if the intellectual were to assume personal responsibility for implementing it, and then availed of the opportunity to revise the idea with the lessons learned from toiling away within that unforgiving plane of reality.

There’s causality at work here.

People who consider themselves “intellectuals” prize “intelligence” above all things. It’s a very particular kind of intelligence, though, that for lack of a better term I call “verbal dexterity.” It’s not IQ per se (though most of these folks are probably a standard deviation or two above the mean), but more of a jack-of-all-trades kind of brainpower — better than average at most mental things, but not good enough to make a living doing one of them exclusively. (As Sowell points out, software engineers, actuaries, physicians, and the like don’t describe themselves as intellectuals, even though you need a fair bit of brainpower to do any of them).

Stopping with the idea, then, is a psychological defense mechanism. Most “intellectuals” aren’t detail guys and they know it. If they tried to implement their ideas, they’d muck it up from step one. So they don’t, and when it invariably fails, it’s the other guys’ fault. Their vision was perfect, see; it was just the exposed-buttcrack laborer types — you know, the proles, who couldn’t even get into a decent Wymyn’s Studies graduate program — who goofed it all up.

[This, incidentally, is why lefties love the law — lawyers get paid either way, and don’t have to deal with the ramifications of what they do.]